"The ideal society or State is that in which respect for individual liberty and free growth of the personal being to his perfec60n is harmonised with respect for the needs, efficiency, solidarity, natural growth and
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organic perfection of the corporate being, the society or nation. In an ideal aggregate of all humanity, in the international society or State, national liberty and free national growth and self- realisation ought in the same way to be progressively harmonised with the solidarity and unified growth and perfection of the human race.
Therefore, if this basic principle were admitted, there might indeed be fluctuations due to the difficulty of a perfect working combination, as in the growth of the national aggregate there has been sometimes a stress on liberty and at others a stress on efficiency and order; but since the right conditions of the problem would have been recognised from the beginning and not left to be worked out in a blind tug-of-war, there would be some chance of an earlier reasonable solution with much less friction and violence in the process.
But there is little chance of such an unprecedented good fortune for mankind. Ideal conditions cannot be expected, for they demand a psychological clarity, a diffused reasonableness and scientific intelligence and, above all, a moral elevation and rectitude to which neither the mass of mankind nor its leaders and rulers have yet made any approach. In their absence, not reason and justice and mutual kindliness, but the trend of forces and their practical and legal adjustment must determine the working out of this as of other problems. And just as the problem of the State and the individual has been troubled and obscured not only by the conflict between individual egoism and the corporate egoism of the society, but by the continual clash between intermediate powers, class strife, quarrels of Church and State, king and nobles, king and commons, aristocracy and demos, capitalist bourgeoisie and labour proletariate, this problem too of nation and international humanity is certain to be troubled by the claims of just such intermediate powers. To say nothing of commercial interests and combinations, cultural or racial sympathies, movements of Pan-Islamism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Germanism, Pan- Anglo-Saxonism, with a possible Pan-Americanism and Pan- Mongolianism looming up in the future, to say nothing of yet other unborn monsters, there will always be the great intermediate factor of Imperialism, that huge armed and dominant
Page-373
Titan, that must by its very nature demand its own satisfaction, at the cost of every suppressed or inconvenient national unit and assert its own needs as prior to the need~ of the new-born inter. national comity. That satisfaction, presumably, it must have for a time, that demand it will be for long impossible to resist..."
Page-372
organic perfection of the corporate being, the society or nation. In an ideal aggregate of all humanity, in the international society or State, national liberty and free national growth and self- realisation ought in the same way to be progressively harmonised with the solidarity and unified growth and perfection of the human race.
Therefore, if this basic principle were admitted, there might indeed be fluctuations due to the difficulty of a perfect working combination, as in the growth of the national aggregate there has been sometimes a stress on liberty and at others a stress on efficiency and order; but since the right conditions of the problem would have been recognised from the beginning and not left to be worked out in a blind tug-of-war, there would be some chance of an earlier reasonable solution with much less friction and violence in the process.
But there is little chance of such an unprecedented good fortune for mankind. Ideal conditions cannot be expected, for they demand a psychological clarity, a diffused reasonableness and scientific intelligence and, above all, a moral elevation and rectitude to which neither the mass of mankind nor its leaders and rulers have yet made any approach. In their absence, not reason and justice and mutual kindliness, but the trend of forces and their practical and legal adjustment must determine the working out of this as of other problems. And just as the problem of the State and the individual has been troubled and obscured not only by the conflict between individual egoism and the corporate egoism of the society, but by the continual clash between intermediate powers, class strife, quarrels of Church and State, king and nobles, king and commons, aristocracy and demos, capitalist bourgeoisie and labour proletariate, this problem too of nation and international humanity is certain to be troubled by the claims of just such intermediate powers. To say nothing of commercial interests and combinations, cultural or racial sympathies, movements of Pan-Islamism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Germanism, Pan- Anglo-Saxonism, with a possible Pan-Americanism and Pan- Mongolianism looming up in the future, to say nothing of yet other unborn monsters, there will always be the great intermediate factor of Imperialism, that huge armed and dominant
Page-373
Titan, that must by its very nature demand its own satisfaction, at the cost of every suppressed or inconvenient national unit and assert its own needs as prior to the need~ of the new-born inter. national comity. That satisfaction, presumably, it must have for a time, that demand it will be for long impossible to resist..."
Read more @ Sri Aurobindo's Social and political volume 15
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